The decision to annex, or not, the Hogan-Pancost parcel will be made by the next City Council, it was agreed late Tuesday night.

With just a few weeks before the election, 100 people were still waiting in line as of 10 p.m. to deliver public comments on the proposed annexation. That was going to take about four hours. And only then could the council begin deliberations, which would also require several hours.

The council seemed to agree that the Hogan-Pancost question — should Boulder annex the 22-acre county enclave for the purpose of eventual development of housing? — would need not one, but two extra meetings before a vote would be possible.

So, even though many thought there would be a five-member council majority in support of scheduling the extra meeting, or meetings, in order to get to a vote before the election, the council voted unanimously just before 11 p.m. to pause the hearing.

They'll pick back up on Dec. 12 and then cast a vote Dec. 19, according to a revised schedule.

It was a win for the many neighborhood activists who showed up Tuesday with intentions of filibustering the meeting to force a delay. They comprised the majority of the 100 people who were still signed up to deliver public comment, but who got to go home when it was decided that the matter would be continued.

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The vote to push to December wrapped up a tense few days in which citizens rallied to influence the political process through a filibuster and council members tussled over scheduling.

One day earlier, Jones and members Jan Burton and Matt Appelbaum convened as the Council Agenda Committee to discuss how the Tuesday hearing would go.

Burton and Appelbaum — along with Aaron Brockett, Andrew Shoemaker and Bob Yates — were in the majority of council members that weeks ago thought it would be a good idea to hear Hogan-Pancost before the Nov. 7 election.

Jones, Mary Young, Lisa Morzel and Sam Weaver thought there wouldn't be enough time to finish off review of the notoriously complex parcel, which has vexed developers and officials for decades, before the election.

And at the Monday committee meeting, Burton and Appelbaum seemed to suggest that they were prepared to fight for a third council meeting, prior to Election Day, in order to finish Hogan-Pancost with the same nine members that started it.

As Tuesday's meeting dragged on, though, it became clear that one more meeting would probably not be enough.

In November, voters will choose five council members among the 14 running. Burton, Weaver and Young are incumbents, while Appelbaum and Shoemaker are stepping down. So, at a minimum, two new members — and as many as five — will preside over Hogan-Pancost in December. They'll have to refer to the nine hours of archived footage from this month's meetings for context.

"It makes sense to me to have the same nine people work on this until it's done. That is not seeming very doable," Brockett said. "I pity the two or more council members having to start with this."

"It's a hell of a way to start new council members," Jones said.

The decision to delay was ultimately made unanimously, but not before Appelbaum, the former mayor and longtime council member, got in a remark about the unusually chilly nature of council relations since Hogan-Pancost reared its head last week.

In his view, the minority that all along wanted to push the matter beyond Election Day was simply banking on the next council being more anti-annexation at Hogan-Pancost than this one is. That was the precise bet made by neighbors who planned to filibuster.

But the minority members at times accused the majority of the same kind of tactics, suggesting that they wanted to bring Hogan-Pancost up before the election because they knew they might have five members prepare to OK an annexation.

"I'm just going state the obvious because I'm leaving in a month: This has been super politicized. It's really unacceptable," Appelbaum said. "I don't want to end on a really pathetic note."

Later in the meeting, several members felt that the process wasn't so toxic as some felt, and that they were grateful the council could reach a unanimous decision by night's end.

The meeting was scheduled to run as late as 1:30 a.m., but it ended at 11 p.m.

By then, the council had only just gotten through the portion of the hearing during which the developers, city staff and neighborhood opposition had a chance to offer testimony on key issues of flood risk, wetlands and groundwater both on and near the site.

As expected, the developers made the case that their planned 117 housing units would not change the local groundwater system or increase risk for people in the nearby Greenbelt Meadows and Keewaydin Meadows neighborhoods of east Boulder.

Expert witnesses presenting on behalf of the neighbors made the opposite case.

At one point, a University of Colorado professor supporting the neighbors told the developers that he would have flunked them, had they come to his class with the groundwater analysis they presented Tuesday.

This delighted the neighbors in the crowd, many of whom were united in red clothing, thanks to pre-meeting coordination.

Even though the council's decision scheduling didn't occur until later in the meeting, the members held a bit of discussion at the onset that revealed the concerns of some council members over how this had been handled.

Morzel, Young and Weaver all spoke out.

By rearranging the agenda at the last minute, Morzel said, the council shows disrespect for a predictable and honest public process.

"We are failing," she said.

"I'm pretty darn disappointed," said Weaver, who will miss next week's meeting, during which the council will take up the delayed issue of sheltering of the homeless. "It's insulting," he added, to have the sheltering item "kicked to the curb."

And Young summarized the essential complaint of the minority: that the City Council should not be hearing, on a difficult timeline and just before an election, a proposal concerning a property that's been the focus of development controversy for about 30 years.

"I don't think we're going get through this tonight," Young said. "I don't think we're going to get through this if we add another meeting. ... To what end are we doing this? To what end are we ceding our community values to do something that is not feasible?"

Appelbaum defended the agenda committee's approach, and said that agendas get rearranged at the last minute all the time.

"To what end?" he said to Young. "To the same end as usual: to make the meeting flow a little bit better."

But a few hours later, they would all leave with a new agreed-upon plan.

And Hogan-Pancost, one of the most controversial development sites in a city known for controversy around development, is left up to a future City Council, two months from now.

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